Resurrection Man

By Eoin McNamee

Victor Kelly is the resurrection man, a violent and ruthless Protestant killer roaming the streets of Belfast in the 1970s. In this, his brilliant and shocking debut novel, Eoin McNamee announced his arrival as one of the leading chroniclers of Ireland’s fractured past.

Victor Kelly is an artist of sorts - a man who transfigures other men, whose victims are etched with care and craft suggesting a larger purpose. The dense, enfolded maze of Belfast is his habitat; he prowls streets and alleys with the silence of a skilled predator. While Victor offers neither comfort nor absolution, his power over death ensures him a form of eternal life—if only in men’s memories and dreams.

A novel based on the Shankill Butchers.

“I believe that with Resurrection Man, I sort of wrote myself out, exhausted whatever literary resources I had,” he says. “It was a long time before I could find another story that I could stick with for the duration of a novel. It’s not that I’m reluctant to start a new novel, it’s just that if I’m writing without conviction I run out of steam after about twenty pages. But I never stopped writing. I’ve never done anything else really”. Further, on the film of Resurrection Man: “The Tory press lined up to take pot-shots at this “poisonous out-pouring of anti-unionist bile“ [… It was effectively censored in the North it was shown on only one screen in the entire province.’”

Further Infomation

YEAR WRITTEN

1994

YEAR SET

1977

REVIEWS

“One of the heavy hitters of the contemporary literary Renaissance…the novel is hugely and alarmingly evocative and marks McNamee as a writer of significance. A dark vision of evil loosed into an already chaotic world…an undoubtedly important novel.”